From what I've seen in various places concerning what is likely to be part of the second wave of releases for A Call to Arms: Star Fleet (and Starline 2500), it seems that the Tholian Attack and Battleships Attack modules are fairly high on the ships-to-crib-from list. (I would mention the Fed BB and DNL already getting 3D model previews as evidence; but the provisional "Battleships" in book 2's name is perhaps a more obvious giveaway, though we haven't seen any of the FC:TA stuff float over just yet.)
So, if both modules are in play, it seems a fairly safe bet that we'll get the range of Neo-Tholian and Seltorian ships seen in both modules; but even if either (or both) fleets end up being pushed back for some reason, their presence in FC makes it likely they will show up eventually. Either way, both empires would be set to offer some interesting options once they land on the tabletop.
In the Star Fleet Universe, the Tholians originate in the M81 Galaxy, which they gradually conquered and ruled fror centuries before being overthrown (and virtually exterminated as a species) in the Seltorian Revolt.
The "TV" Tholian ships are derived from the police ships used by the Tholian Will back in the home galaxy; the old Tholian Navy flew very different hulls, and used technologies that were mostly lost to the Holdfast Tholians prior to the arrival of a naval exile fleet (known to the Federation as the 312th Battle Squadron) during the height of the General War. (Since the UFP didn't know that these were old ships from another galaxy when they first encountered them, they mistook them for new construction; thus referring to them as "Neo-Tholian" ships. Even after the truth of the matter was made clear, the distinction between "Archeos" and "Neos" stuck.)
The Neo-Tholian ships range from the diminutive NFF all the way up to the fearsome NBB; though historically the 312th was centred on the NCLs, NCAs and NDNs that were in a viable enough condition to enter service in the Milky Way. (The Holdfast sphere had a handful of NDDs and NFFs when they first arrived, but these were all lost in early wars with the Klingons; while there was no NBB in the 312th, one such unit, the War Havoc, led a separate Tholian exodus to the Draco Dwarf satellite galaxy, where it was "beached" on a new colony world.)
The M81 versions of these hulls (and the frigates and destroyers the early Holdfast had) were armed with particle cannons as one of their main heavy weapons; the ships of the 312th had these weapons replaced with disruptors instead. PCs have weaker individual shots than disuptors in FC, but can be fired twice per turn (one of which can be overloaded). If you look at this sample Neo-Tholian Ship Card for FC, you can see how allowances are made for both disruptor and particle cannon armament; there are other rules governing combat in the home galaxy in the Reference Rulebook, such as no seeking weapons and no using of suicide shuttles.
However, one key weapon the Neos (from the NDD up) carry is the web caster; one of the key pieces of technology that bound the Will ltogether, and one which provided a very nasty surprise to the Coalition forces looking to defeat the Holdfast in Operation Nutcracker. (Web casters are able to lay web at range from the firing unit, which can make a ship's maneuver difficult and cause trouble for any incoming seeking weapons. They also have a "web fist" direct-fire mode, that can be used to punch at an enemy unit directly. However, given the limited availability of web casters in the Milky Way, both FC and SFB enforce strict deployment restrictions for web caster-equipped units in Holdfast Tholian fleets. If you want to get a sense of how dangerous the Tholians were back in the old galaxy, you merely need to try flying a Neo-Tholian force without any such restrictions.)
All well and good, you might think. But then, you may ask yourself; if web casters made the home galaxy Tholians so good, how on Earth (or, well, Tholia Prime) did anyone manage to overthrow them?
The seeds of their downfall came from their own success. While the Tholians had been able to conquer the entire M81 Galaxy (save for the odd inhabited nebula their webs wouldn't work properly in), the Tholians themselves were simply too few in number, and too alien in physiology, to enforce their will efficiently. (Their ancestral home world, Tholia Prime, was the only planet in all of known space that Tholians could live on unaided; even the open-air colony in Draco needs a web-based dust shield to lower the surface temperature to tolerable levels. This is one key reason why the Tholians built their Spheres; so they could settle the galaxy without bothering with planets infested with inferior carbon-based life forms.)
So, they established various enforcer species, who could do the hard work of overseeing slave species, chasing down pirate bands and putting down small-scale rebellions, leaving the Will to see to its own business relatively unmolested. However, the enforcers had an annoying habit of rebelling agaisnt Tholian rule; which, in light of the aforementioned web-based advantages the Will possessed, made this a losing proposition.
Eventually, the Tholians hit upon the idea of tailoring their own enforcer species themselves. They genetically engineered an insectoid species into the Seltorians (not least by encoding a "loyalty gene" into their DNA) and provided them with the ships, support units and weapons systems needed to do their thankless work.
The Seltorian fleet is shaped by this setup. Their ships (ranging from frigates to dreadnoughts; here's a look at their CA) are armed with the same particle cannons as the old galaxy Neos, but also use shield crackers to strip the shields of rebel or pirate hulls, at which point their generous numbers of marine squads can beam over and capture the miscreants (as the Tholians would consider them to be). Also, their fixed-location shipyards are supplemented by the use of Hive and Nest ships; massive hulls converted from cargo ships, each capablle of docking several smaller Seltorian ships, or even building new ones with access to enough external resources.
For a time, this went quite swimmingly for the Tholians; so much so that by the time of the Revolt, almost four-fifths of the ships enforcing the Will were Seltorian units. This was seen as acceptable, since the Seltorians had no battleships, and no answer to web... or so the Tholians thought. In truth, two things had happened to critically endanger the status quo; more and more Seltorians were being hatched without the loyalty gene (but with a fantical hatred of their masters in its place), and a key breakthrough enabled the Seltorians to refit their shield crackers into the dreaded web breakers.
Web breakers are an alternate firing option of shield crackers; instead of stripping a unit's shields, they instead degrade any strands of web they encounter. This is bad news for Tholian naval forces, since their key advantage is severely reduced by the use of web breakers; but it was fatal for most of the Tholian spheres, which relied on web to hold themselves together. And to make sure they could overcome the heaviest defences of the Tholian Will (and to provide the critical mass of web breaker fire needed to destabilise a sphere) the Seltorians took several of their Hive Ships, ripped out six of the eight docking bays, and replaced them with row upon row of side-firing web breakers. The seemingly-innocuous cargo hauler had suddenly become an instrument of mass xenocide the Seltorians were all too happy to unleash.
The Battlewagon was introduced to FC in Battleships Attack, and later made it over to SFB in Module R12; one of the few ships in the SFU to show up in FC first. Should it make it into wave 2, it would not only give Seltorian players a highly dangerous siege engine for use against enemy starbases (not least since the web breakers can still be fired as shield crackers) but would introduce something of the broad-siding dynamic which players of A Call to Arms: Noble Armada might be more used to (since the bulk of the BW's firepower would be in either the L or R arc; plus the unit itself would almost certainly be Lumbering, since even in FC and SFB the thing turns like a pig and cannot HET.)
Given their deadly connection to the (Neo-)Tholians, the Seltorians ended up with the distinction of being the first SFU-native empire to be formally published in both FC and Starmada; but should they get their biggest toys in wave 2, ACtA:SF will be the first game where they will be showcased with their most devastating siege engines right off the bat.
And did I mention that a Hive Ship (the Burning Torch of Vengeance) eventually shows up in the Alpha Octant looking for more Tholians to kill?
So, with all of that in mind, are there any ideas you have in terms of how the Neo-Tholians and Seltorians might work in this game system; and does the prospect of unleashing the apocalyptic battles of the Revolt (and the eventual rematches here in the Milky Way) sound like something you'd actually want to fight out for yourself?
So, if both modules are in play, it seems a fairly safe bet that we'll get the range of Neo-Tholian and Seltorian ships seen in both modules; but even if either (or both) fleets end up being pushed back for some reason, their presence in FC makes it likely they will show up eventually. Either way, both empires would be set to offer some interesting options once they land on the tabletop.
In the Star Fleet Universe, the Tholians originate in the M81 Galaxy, which they gradually conquered and ruled fror centuries before being overthrown (and virtually exterminated as a species) in the Seltorian Revolt.
The "TV" Tholian ships are derived from the police ships used by the Tholian Will back in the home galaxy; the old Tholian Navy flew very different hulls, and used technologies that were mostly lost to the Holdfast Tholians prior to the arrival of a naval exile fleet (known to the Federation as the 312th Battle Squadron) during the height of the General War. (Since the UFP didn't know that these were old ships from another galaxy when they first encountered them, they mistook them for new construction; thus referring to them as "Neo-Tholian" ships. Even after the truth of the matter was made clear, the distinction between "Archeos" and "Neos" stuck.)
The Neo-Tholian ships range from the diminutive NFF all the way up to the fearsome NBB; though historically the 312th was centred on the NCLs, NCAs and NDNs that were in a viable enough condition to enter service in the Milky Way. (The Holdfast sphere had a handful of NDDs and NFFs when they first arrived, but these were all lost in early wars with the Klingons; while there was no NBB in the 312th, one such unit, the War Havoc, led a separate Tholian exodus to the Draco Dwarf satellite galaxy, where it was "beached" on a new colony world.)
The M81 versions of these hulls (and the frigates and destroyers the early Holdfast had) were armed with particle cannons as one of their main heavy weapons; the ships of the 312th had these weapons replaced with disruptors instead. PCs have weaker individual shots than disuptors in FC, but can be fired twice per turn (one of which can be overloaded). If you look at this sample Neo-Tholian Ship Card for FC, you can see how allowances are made for both disruptor and particle cannon armament; there are other rules governing combat in the home galaxy in the Reference Rulebook, such as no seeking weapons and no using of suicide shuttles.
However, one key weapon the Neos (from the NDD up) carry is the web caster; one of the key pieces of technology that bound the Will ltogether, and one which provided a very nasty surprise to the Coalition forces looking to defeat the Holdfast in Operation Nutcracker. (Web casters are able to lay web at range from the firing unit, which can make a ship's maneuver difficult and cause trouble for any incoming seeking weapons. They also have a "web fist" direct-fire mode, that can be used to punch at an enemy unit directly. However, given the limited availability of web casters in the Milky Way, both FC and SFB enforce strict deployment restrictions for web caster-equipped units in Holdfast Tholian fleets. If you want to get a sense of how dangerous the Tholians were back in the old galaxy, you merely need to try flying a Neo-Tholian force without any such restrictions.)
All well and good, you might think. But then, you may ask yourself; if web casters made the home galaxy Tholians so good, how on Earth (or, well, Tholia Prime) did anyone manage to overthrow them?
The seeds of their downfall came from their own success. While the Tholians had been able to conquer the entire M81 Galaxy (save for the odd inhabited nebula their webs wouldn't work properly in), the Tholians themselves were simply too few in number, and too alien in physiology, to enforce their will efficiently. (Their ancestral home world, Tholia Prime, was the only planet in all of known space that Tholians could live on unaided; even the open-air colony in Draco needs a web-based dust shield to lower the surface temperature to tolerable levels. This is one key reason why the Tholians built their Spheres; so they could settle the galaxy without bothering with planets infested with inferior carbon-based life forms.)
So, they established various enforcer species, who could do the hard work of overseeing slave species, chasing down pirate bands and putting down small-scale rebellions, leaving the Will to see to its own business relatively unmolested. However, the enforcers had an annoying habit of rebelling agaisnt Tholian rule; which, in light of the aforementioned web-based advantages the Will possessed, made this a losing proposition.
Eventually, the Tholians hit upon the idea of tailoring their own enforcer species themselves. They genetically engineered an insectoid species into the Seltorians (not least by encoding a "loyalty gene" into their DNA) and provided them with the ships, support units and weapons systems needed to do their thankless work.
The Seltorian fleet is shaped by this setup. Their ships (ranging from frigates to dreadnoughts; here's a look at their CA) are armed with the same particle cannons as the old galaxy Neos, but also use shield crackers to strip the shields of rebel or pirate hulls, at which point their generous numbers of marine squads can beam over and capture the miscreants (as the Tholians would consider them to be). Also, their fixed-location shipyards are supplemented by the use of Hive and Nest ships; massive hulls converted from cargo ships, each capablle of docking several smaller Seltorian ships, or even building new ones with access to enough external resources.
For a time, this went quite swimmingly for the Tholians; so much so that by the time of the Revolt, almost four-fifths of the ships enforcing the Will were Seltorian units. This was seen as acceptable, since the Seltorians had no battleships, and no answer to web... or so the Tholians thought. In truth, two things had happened to critically endanger the status quo; more and more Seltorians were being hatched without the loyalty gene (but with a fantical hatred of their masters in its place), and a key breakthrough enabled the Seltorians to refit their shield crackers into the dreaded web breakers.
Web breakers are an alternate firing option of shield crackers; instead of stripping a unit's shields, they instead degrade any strands of web they encounter. This is bad news for Tholian naval forces, since their key advantage is severely reduced by the use of web breakers; but it was fatal for most of the Tholian spheres, which relied on web to hold themselves together. And to make sure they could overcome the heaviest defences of the Tholian Will (and to provide the critical mass of web breaker fire needed to destabilise a sphere) the Seltorians took several of their Hive Ships, ripped out six of the eight docking bays, and replaced them with row upon row of side-firing web breakers. The seemingly-innocuous cargo hauler had suddenly become an instrument of mass xenocide the Seltorians were all too happy to unleash.
The Battlewagon was introduced to FC in Battleships Attack, and later made it over to SFB in Module R12; one of the few ships in the SFU to show up in FC first. Should it make it into wave 2, it would not only give Seltorian players a highly dangerous siege engine for use against enemy starbases (not least since the web breakers can still be fired as shield crackers) but would introduce something of the broad-siding dynamic which players of A Call to Arms: Noble Armada might be more used to (since the bulk of the BW's firepower would be in either the L or R arc; plus the unit itself would almost certainly be Lumbering, since even in FC and SFB the thing turns like a pig and cannot HET.)
Given their deadly connection to the (Neo-)Tholians, the Seltorians ended up with the distinction of being the first SFU-native empire to be formally published in both FC and Starmada; but should they get their biggest toys in wave 2, ACtA:SF will be the first game where they will be showcased with their most devastating siege engines right off the bat.
And did I mention that a Hive Ship (the Burning Torch of Vengeance) eventually shows up in the Alpha Octant looking for more Tholians to kill?
So, with all of that in mind, are there any ideas you have in terms of how the Neo-Tholians and Seltorians might work in this game system; and does the prospect of unleashing the apocalyptic battles of the Revolt (and the eventual rematches here in the Milky Way) sound like something you'd actually want to fight out for yourself?
- basically trying to make them surrender.
.
